The best (and worst) of British

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

5/11/10, 9:05 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 9:03 PM CET

Winners and losers in the UK general election.

The overall outcome of the general election in Britain last Thursday (6 May) was not immediately clear, but one minor point of certainty was that Caroline Lucas would be leaving the European Parliament.

She became the first Green ever to be elected to the national parliament, under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system of individual constituencies (she will represent a constituency in Brighton, on the south coast). Her replacement in the European Parliament will be Kevin Taylor, a local councillor in Brighton, who stood (unsuccessfully) for the Green party in the same constituency in the 2005 national election, only to be replaced this time round by Lucas.

Not all MEPs were so successful in Thursday’s contest. Nick Griffin, of the far-right anti-immigration BritishNational Party, was a distant third in the vote in the appropriately named constituency of Barking in east London. Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party MEPs, paid the price for having famously compared Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, to a dishcloth. On the morning of the election Farage was a passenger in a light aircraft that was flying a banner proclaiming: ‘Vote for your country. Vote UKIP.’ The banner wrapped itself around the tail of the aircraft, precipitating a crash landing.

Farage spent election night in hospital, and so did not attend the count. His bid to unseat the speaker of the House of Commons, who is by tradition elected unopposed, failed: he came in third behind the speaker, John Bercow, and John Stevens, a former Conservative MEP who is very pro-euro. Note to conspiracy theorists: fact one, Farage has clashed recently with Jerzy Buzek, the president of the European Parliament and a former prime minister of Poland; fact two, the plane that crashed was Polish.

A couple of ex-MEPs did all right for themselves: Chris Heaton-Harris, who was once one of the H-block of Eurosceptic Conservative MEPs, was elected to the national parliament. Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat, who first switched to the national parliament in 2005, was re-elected, against predictions that he would be unseated by his Conservative rival.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, another ex-MEP, was re-elected, but his party did less well than expected. Since the election produced no clear majority for any one party, Clegg found himself negotiating on whether to throw his party’s support to the right or the left. Sadly, this means Clegg has been rather busy since Thursday, and unable to shed further light on an interview he gave to the Guardian during the campaign in which he was asked: “Which living person do you most despise, and why?” and answered: “I used to work with an EU bureaucrat who destroyed the careers of some good colleagues.” Candidates for identification on a postcard, please, to Entre Nous at the usual address.